Greater New Orleans

Eric Cantor visits the Good Shepherd School in New Orleans in November to promote vouchers. A new federal report says the program made integration worse in at least 15 schools.
(Julia Kumari Drapkin, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

A U.S. Justice Department report says Louisiana's school voucher program has not helped racial segregation in private schools and made segregation worse in at least 15 public schools, albeit to a very small degree. The report, filed Monday, provides ballast for U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle's November decision that the federal government has the right to monitor voucher enrollment.

Lemelle ordered the state and federal governments to come up with a monitoring process.

About 6,750 students attend private school at public expense through the Louisiana Scholarship Program, which drew lawsuits and uproar from the start. Gov. Bobby Jindal had to scramble to find money for the program this summer, after the Louisiana Supreme Court struck down its original funding plan. Jindal spent the fall defending vouchers after the federal government petitioned the court saying the program might hurt integration in 34 school systems under long-standing desegregation orders.

Jindal said Tuesday the new findings were meaningless.

"The Department's report shows that in 15 public schools, just one percent of the state's total, the racial composition of the student body may have changed by a minuscule amount," he said in a statement. "Never mind that nearly 7,000 low-income, mostly minority students are now learning in the school of their families' choosing thanks to this program."

He also said the federal government had a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the voucher program because the report implies that the state assigns students to private schools, when in fact the parents decide where to apply and the state matches them with available spots, sometimes encouraging schools to add an extra seat for a student using a voucher.

Department of Justice attorneys emphasize that they were not drawing the conclusion that the voucher program violated desegregation orders. However, the report by Erica Frankenberg found 15 public schools that would have been more integrated if voucher students were there. For instance, one unnamed school would have had 66.5 percent black students but instead is 68.1 percent black.

Frankenberg acknowledges the impact is small but says she was unable to analyze many of the students because the state did not provide enough data. She also says growing voucher enrollment could make the problem worse, writing in the federal report, "Preliminary findings indicate that it is important to collect and analyze data properly to be able to assess these moving forward to ensure that voucher reassignments do not result in more students attending racially segregated schools."

On an individual level, the program worsened integration for white students, who tended to choose voucher schools that were less diverse than the ones they left. Black students did not experience any change in their schools' racial balance, going from largely black public schools to private schools with similar enrollment.

"White students leave schools with considerable white and black diversity to attend overwhelmingly white schools, on average, while black students typically remain in school environments that are largely black," Frankenberg writes.

In Ouachita Parish, five white students left non-segregated schools for Claiborne Christian School, which the report says is 90 percent white - moving from less to more segregration.

Also in Ouachita, 23 black students moved from a nearly all-black public school to Prevailing Faith Christian Academy, which was 97 percent black. The report said the students would have found more diversity by enrolling in any of the parish's four other voucher schools. One of those four other schools was two-thirds black and the rest were majority-white.

"Any of the other four private schools that enrolled voucher recipients in the district would have provided greater interracial exposure for these students and would have made the private schools more diverse as well," Frankenberg writes.

Looking at the private schools, Frankenberg said vouchers did not reduce segregation there and in some cases made it worse.

"The majority of black voucher recipient students (more than 62 percent) are assigned to private schools that are 90-100 percent black," Frankenberg writes. "The reverse pattern is seen for white voucher recipients. More than 40 percent of white recipients are assigned to private schools that are 90-100 percent white, whereas just 5.5 percent are assigned to 90-100 percent black private schools."

The federal report contradicts one commissioned by the state that said the voucher program improved integration. It's not clear whether the authors of the separate reports examined the same subset of students.

Also, the federal report incorrectly identifies Jefferson Parish as being under a desegregation order. The order ended in 2011, though the system continues to monitor racial balance. This year, 476 Jefferson children are using vouchers.

Frankenberg is an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University and received $125 per hour for the federal analysis, the report states. She previously worked at the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, a University of California at Los Angeles desegregation think tank.

Department of Justice attorneys wrote in a memo that the report's data underline their need to monitor voucher assignments.

"To ensure that the state is proceeding in compliance with the orders in this case, a process must be instituted for the full and proper collection and review of data on the voucher program," they wrote.